And he urged the West to treat Ebola as if it was taking hold in the swankiest parts of London rather than Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.

He said: “We must respond to this emergency as if it was in Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster.

“We must also tackle the scandal of the unwillingness of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in research on treatments and vaccines, something they refuse to do because the numbers involved are, in their terms, so small and don’t justify the investment.

“This is the moral bankruptcy of capitalism acting in the absence of a moral and social framework.”

Professor Ashton compared drugs firms’ response to Ebola to that of the AIDS epidemic, which killed people in Africa for years before treatments were developed once it spread to the West in the 1980s and 90s.